Adaptation
(2002)
Rusty: Jury Grand PrixAward nominations: Academy Award for Best Actor (Nicolas Cage)
Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress (Meryl Streep)
Academy Award for Best Writing, Adapted Screenplay (Charlie Kaufman)Award details: (details at IMDb)
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Adaptation. is a 2002 American comedy-drama metafilm directed by Spike Jonze and written by Charlie Kaufman. The film is based on Susan Orlean's non-fiction book The Orchid Thief, with numerous self-referential events added. The film stars Nicolas Cage as Charlie and Donald Kaufman, and Meryl Streep as Susan Orlean, Chris Cooper as John Laroche, with Cara Seymour, Brian Cox, Tilda Swinton, Ron Livingston and Maggie Gyllenhaal in supporting roles. Though the film is billed as an adaptation of The Orchid Thief, its primary narrative focus is Charlie Kaufman's struggle to adapt The Orchid Thief into a film, while dramatizing the events of the book in parallel. Adaptation also adds a number of fictitious elements, including Kaufman's twin brother and a romance between Orlean and Laroche, and culminates in completely invented events including fictional versions of Orlean and Laroche three years after the events related in The Orchid Thief, Kaufman and his fictional twin brother. The film had been in development as far back as 1994. Jonathan Demme brought the project to Columbia Pictures with Kaufman writing the script.